Flower Darby

Director of Teaching for Student Success, Northern Arizona State University

Flower Darby celebrates and promotes excellent teaching for the sake of our students and their learning. She’s the Director of Teaching for Student Success at Northern Arizona University, where she’s taught for over 23 years in English, Educational Technology, Leadership, Dance and Pilates. Flower teaches face-to-face, blended and online classes at NAU, and she also teaches online classes at Estrella Mountain Community College. She loves to apply effective teaching principles and practices across the disciplines and to help others do the same. Flower speaks, writes, presents and consults on teaching and learning theory and practice both nationally and internationally. She’s the author, with James M. Lang, of Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes (2019).

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Featured Session

Answering the call: New motivation for online teaching excellence

Answering the call: New motivation for online teaching excellence

Online classes are the only option for many, if not most, of our online students. The flexibility of taking classes online allows students to pursue a college degree or credential to improve their lot in life. Yet online classes offer unique teaching and learning challenges that make it easy for students and faculty both to lose faith, grow fatigued, give up. As we wrap up our time together at DT&L 20/20, we’ll reflect on our learning here and look forward to the opportunities we’ll have as the new academic year begins. To help us focus our reflection, we’ll consider the call to improve the undergraduate educational experience, identified as National Priority One in a 2017 report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Report authors remind us that education is at the heart of the American dream: “every person, from every background, can succeed in America when given the proper training and preparation” (The Future of Undergraduate Education, The Future of America, 2017). Let’s explore ways of answering this call by re-invigorating our online teaching, motivated by the highest ideal of educating our citizenry toward a brighter future for all.